


How It Ends

by InsubstantialScribblings



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Day 7 Here Comes The Sun!, F/M, Hayffie, Hayffie Summer Week, Post-Mockingjay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 03:57:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20203336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsubstantialScribblings/pseuds/InsubstantialScribblings
Summary: Haymitch reflects on the history of his relationship with Effie.





	How It Ends

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies in advance for the quality of this one, folks. It didn't turn out exactly how I wanted but I didn't want to miss posting something on the final day of Hayffie Summer Week either. It's not long at least!

** HOW IT ENDS **

** **

Haymitch stood at his bedroom window, looking out at the village below. The fingers of his right hand were keeping up an irritating drumbeat against his thigh, but he was powerless to stop either them or the intense feeling of disquiet that had gripped his chest and stomach. He could really use a drink right about now, but the kids had cleared the house of supplies last night, no doubt worried he’d do something stupid. Later though, he promised himself. When it was over.

He took in the scene before him, hoping to distract himself.

It was a beautiful day in early June – warm and bright, but without the searing heat or awful humidity of high summer. The sky was clear and blue as far as the eye could see and the sun shone down on the village green, the grass still lush and as yet unravaged by the inevitable dry spell to come.

For the first time ever, it looked pretty out there.

It never had done before, back then, in Games Time, before the war. There’d been a whole team of groundskeepers of course, and never a blade of grass out of place, but it had never looked pretty. Imposing, certainly, and haughty and unapproachable, exactly as the Capitol had no doubt intended. It wasn’t like that now.

Peeta had dug out sweeping borders around all of the houses, even the empty ones, and, every spring, primroses bloomed in the beds in front of the house he shared with Katniss, faded by now and replaced with swathes of lavender that had opened up their flowers to the sun.

His own front garden featured anemones in purples, pinks and reds and, behind them, currently out of his sight, sweet peas in pastel shades wound their way up the trellises he’d constructed on either side of the porch. Effie had planted all those months earlier, constantly checking the flowerbeds for evidence of the bulbs pushing out of the soil, examining the seed trays for signs of growth. She’d been so excited the day she’d seen the first green shoots appear.

She’d been with them in Twelve for more than half a year by then and she’d changed so much. The skinny shadow of a woman who’d arrived unannounced one day last summer, with not a penny to her name and a head full of trauma, had receded to reveal a beauty once again. A beauty who still woke screaming in the night sometimes, who still flinched at sudden noises or unexpected visitors, but who now laughed and scolded, fussed and fretted, and drew up schedules again.

She should be here now, thought Haymitch, surprised to find himself wishing he could call her to see the blossoms she’d worked so hard to nurture looking this resplendent in the late morning sunlight.

Any such call would fall on deaf ears though. The house was loud with her absence, without her energy and chatter filling the rooms and his head. A creature of solitude for so long, it had annoyed him much of the time and he’d never shied away from telling her so, but right now he wished she was there for him to hear, to share this sight with.

Perhaps she was looking anyway. The sudden thought brought his gaze to the windows of the kids’ house opposite, where she’d retreated last night, forbidding him to follow. From where she would leave today to start her new life. He flicked his eyes away again, suddenly dizzy and nauseous. He didn’t want to risk seeing her, meeting her eye. Not now.

He’d thought many times over the years about how things would turn out between him and Effie, but he’d never expected it to end like this.

That very first year she’d become his escort he’d goaded and abused her to breaking point – stupid Capitol creature that she had been, with that infuriating way of getting under his skin like no-one else ever had – and she’d seen him off to his train back to Twelve haughtily declaring she was going straight to the head gamemaker to demand promotion or tender her resignation. He’d laughed in her face – ‘Good riddance, sweetheart’ – and then spent the rest of the year trying and failing to wash her image from his eyes, her voice from his ears.

But that hadn’t been the end of his association with Effie Trinket after all, for there she was still the next reaping day, ridiculous in shocking pink from her wig to her shiny shoes, chin tilted defiantly at his mocking smirk. They’d fucked that year – rough and angry but deeply satisfying sex against the wall in a darkened corridor of the penthouse – and they’d both been shocked and horrified with themselves, both vowing that was the end of the matter. It never was though, not that year, nor any year in the rest of the decade that followed.

The year of the seventy-fourth Games, the year he’d brought the kids home, the year of the ill-fated Victory Tour, he’d imagined an end of a different kind. An end for him at any rate, in Twelve’s cemetery, the kids beside him. And after that, after the Quell, when his plans to have her brought to Thirteen had gone so badly awry, he’d imagined that end had belonged instead to her – a tomb in a Capitol graveyard, or worse, an unmarked mass pit behind the prison that had held her.

That was the first year he’d really felt it, had allowed himself to know it. That the end of her would spell the end of him too.

He remembered too the relief and joy – yes, joy, that rarest of emotions to him – that had flooded through him when she’d been found alive – broken, but _alive_ – and how he’d rushed to her side, full of apologies and regrets that she’d refused to hear, so wounded and betrayed. He’d thought he’d known the end well enough then, when he left for Twelve with Katniss, and a part of him had appreciated the irony that such a torrid and volatile liaison should have its ending marked with complete silence.

He’d had half a year to adapt. To ponder a life in which he’d never see her face, never feel the bite of her sharp wit again, never make love to her the way he wished he had. He still hadn’t accepted it that day he opened his door to find her standing there, shattered and desperate with that pitiful pleading in her eyes. He’d welcomed her wordlessly into his arms, into his home and, after a little while, into his bed, nursing her back to health in mind and in body, both of them finally letting the light fall on that small seed of promise that they’d always kept so resolutely in the dark.

It had been a different sort life, a different sort of connection, honest and real, but littered with difficulties and certainly no fairy tale. He’d slowly come to realise that it couldn’t end there, that it wouldn’t be enough, not for her and, in the end, not for him either. He was irritable and impatient and difficult to live with, he knew that. He wasn’t worthy of her and that was why he’d had to do it. To force her to really consider what she wanted her future to be.

It hadn’t been planned. It had happened in the middle of an argument yesterday, one of their finest, the sort that had the kids running for cover every time. They’d both been shouting and he’d blurted it out, delivered it like an ultimatum. He’d never seen anything shut her up so fast. The look in her eyes… he’d never forget it. He’d said the rest of his piece more calmly then and she’d listened, nodded and left the room. There’d been a few hasty phone calls and then she’d been gone, dragging her bags over to the kids’ house.

It was already so quiet without her, so empty.

The front door opposite opened then, jolting Haymitch from his memories. He watched as Katniss crossed the green and disappeared again down the side of his property and, just seconds later, he heard the back door click open and then close again behind her.

“Haymitch?”

He sighed with resignation. “Up here.”

The girl climbed the stairs and hesitated behind the open door. “Are you decent?”

“Relax, Sweetheart,” he replied. “The beast is in its cage. Been sent to check up on me, have you?”

“Something like that,” returned Katniss, hovering on the threshold of the room. “I thought we could walk into town together. You look like you could do with the air.”

Haymitch hesitated, glancing towards the kids’ house. “I don’t want to see her.”

Katniss sighed. “Peeta said you’d say that. Well, Effie doesn’t want to risk running into you either. That’s why I’m here now. Peeta’s not going to call the cab for another twenty minutes once he sees us go. We’ll be well out of their way by then.”

“All right.”

Haymitch bent to put on his shoes and followed the girl down the stairs and out of the front door. Peeta’s face was at his lounge window and he raised his hand to them both in greeting, swiftly disappearing from view once again, no doubt to tell Effie the coast was clear.

Haymitch took a deep breath and exhaled it again, his hands shaking, stomach rolling unpleasantly. “I guess this is it then.”

Katniss looked over at him as they began their descent towards the town. “You know, when Effie came here, I never thought things would end up like this.”

“That makes two of us, kid.”

“You look nice, by the way,” she added awkwardly. “Did she pick that out for you?”

“You really have to ask?”

“I’m just surprised that you actually put on something she chose,” returned the girl.

Haymitch gave a snort of laughter. “I know what’s good for me! It’s our wedding day. Her day. She can have whatever she wants today. Or whatever it’s possible to organise with less than twenty-four hours’ notice anyway.”

Katniss looked thoughtful. “You _do_ know, don’t you? And I do too. In the end.”

“Know what?”

“What’s good for us.”

“Yeah. I do. Way I see it, we wasted enough years already. Couldn’t see any point in delaying when it came to it. And, despite all her old dreams of a fancy wedding, nor could Effie.”

The girl lunged forward suddenly, embracing her grumpy mentor with surprising strength. “Congratulations, Haymitch,” she whispered. “I’m so happy for you. Both of you. Truly. And I’m honoured to be your best woman.”

“Who else would I choose?” he muttered, patting her back awkwardly and loosening her grip on him. He shook himself and puffed out his cheeks. “Enough soft talk now. Let’s just get to the Justice Building and get me married. Perhaps then I can finally get a drink.”

He didn’t need it though, he realised as they walked on, surprised to find that his earlier nerves and anxiety had dissipated, replaced by a warm sensation of something that had for so long been alien to him. Of hopefulness. Of anticipation. This wasn’t how things ended. This was merely how the next chapter began.


End file.
